Scads of books are available on crisis management and crisis communication (one of my favorites is “Now is Too Late,” by Gerald Baron, whose CrisisBlogger blog is a terrific resource on the topic). The conversation on crisis communication on yesterday’s FIR, though sparked enough interest for me to cover some of my fundamental beliefs about crises and crisis communication.

What is a crisis?

You can’t check your feeds these days without spotting an article proclaiming one incident or another a “PR crisis.” It seems that everyone from experienced journalists to neophyte bloggers have adopted “PR crisis” as a label for any problem an institution might experience. To qualify as a genuine crisis, though, there needs to be a realistic probability that the company’s reputation is at risk. On yesterday’s FIR, we used Wikipedia’s definition, but I like the one from Christine Pearson and Judith Clair that is used in the standard PR textbook, “Effective Public Relations”:

An organizational crisis is a low-probability, high-impact event that threatens the viability of the organization and is characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, and means of resolution, as well as by a belief that decisions must be made swiftly.”

My friend Wilma Mathews, co-author of the media relations book “On Deadline” and head of PR at Arizona State University, dismisses a lot of the incidents that many people would call a crisis. At dinner one night not too long after the 9-11 attacks, Wilma told me that she had been asked if she had a crisis communication plan for a terrorist attack on the campus. “That’s not a crisis,” she said, since there is no threat to the university’s reputation. “It’s an emergency.”

Types of crises

Crisis communication literature has tackled the categories of crisis a number of ways. Over the years, I have distilled these into three major categories:

• Meteor crisis—Completely unexpected, a meteor crisis falls from the sky. It’s usually characterized by randomness and senselessness and is viewed as a terrible thing. The organization affected is a victim in a meteor crisis, but nevertheless, confidence in the organization is at risk. Consider the recent shooting in an Omaha shopping mall. This was not the mall’s fault, but people may opt to shop elsewhere after the shooting. How quickly and effectively the organization responds will determine whether it is perceived as complicit or innocent.
• Predator crisis—In “The Insider,” Russell Crowe portrayed former tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand, who delivered confidential company documents to “60 Minutes.” I would argue that Wigand did the right thing (others will disagree), but from the company perspective, he was a predator; that is, he was out to cause the company harm. In a predator crisis, the company is hardly a victim—it must have dirty laundry in order for a predator to air it. Other kinds of predator crises include behind-the-scenes disputes that go public, new regulations that expose safety or other shortcomings, and litigation that reveal unsavory business practices (like, for instance, an insurance company that drags its feet approving an organ transplant until the patient has died).
• Breakdown crisis—A breakdown crisis occurs when the company fails to perform. Organizations usually bring breakdown crises on themselves by taking shortcuts, deviating from ethical business practice, or showing disdain for the concerns of its constituents. Product liability lawsuits, recalls, environmental disasters, manufacturing accidents and financial scandals (Enron leaps to mind) all fit in the breakdown crisis category.

The entire discussion on FIR was kicked off by a comment from listener Michael Allison, who identified a new category that can overlay each of the three categories above: a “lingering crisis.” Michael’s example: zoo animals continuing to die over the course of several years (even if from old age or other natural causes) gave anti-zoo activists ongoing fodder to pitch to the media. This lingering crisis could fit as any of the categories above: meteor if the deaths were all natural and had nothing to do with confinement in a zoo, breakdown if some of the animals died due to a failure to comply with zoo standards (a containment wall four feet too short leading to a zoo goer’s death would fit here in a lingering crisis about animal escapes), and predator if a non-issue is made into an issue by an activist group like PETA (which did, in fact, make plenty of hay out of the situation).

Business objectives during a crisis

When handling crisis communications, your efforts should focus on achieving six main objectives:

• Maintain a positive image of the organizatwion
• Present timely, accurate, candid, up-to-date information
• Remain accessible
• Monitor communication channels to catch misinformation early
• Maintain constituent support
• Survive the crisis

Why crises escalate

The last objective listed above, while perhaps a little overly obvious, is one that many organizations forget in the short-term chaos of a crisis. The idea is to emerge from the crisis ready to continue business. A short-term focus on sales at the expense of your long-term reputation may help you make your quarterly projections but sink you over the next year and beyond.

Inside an organization, particularly those that have no crisis plans—or those that do have crisis plans but have not drilled them—you have to be prepared to deal with a variety of reactions and circumstances that lead to some bad decision making. These include…

• Surprise
• Insufficient and incorrect information (leading to some really stupid statements, the most famous of which was CBS’s erroneous reporting of Jim Brady’s death when President Reagan was shot)
• Loss of control as events escalate faster than they can be addressed
• Intense public and media scrutiny
• Adoption of a siege mentality
• Panic (leading to even more stupid statements)
• Short-term focus (like, “How do we meet our quarterly numbers while this is going on?”)

These reactions can be mitigated by understanding some crisis principles and incorporating them into your communication plans and drills:

• The public attaches little credibility to business advocates—like company spokespersons—during a crisis.
• The public is risk-averse. They want to know what you’re going to do to make sure this never happens again.
• The media’s role is based on conflict. The media are not there to help you get your message out.
• Advocacy groups will exploit a conflict for their own purposes.
• Emotion, not logic, prevails.
• Symbols characterize a crisis. Dead, oil-soaked birds are the symbol of the Exxon Valdez incident, while front-line employees who lost their life savings walking out of a building with boxes holding their possessions are the symbol of the Enron crisis.

Crisis strategies

One of the most important, and oft-overlooked, crisis communication strategies is to address your constituents’ perceptions. You cannot manage a crisis, but you can manage the perceptions the crisis creates.

You should never engage in debate during a crisis. No company ever succeeded in crisis communication through a rational argument. Instead, they’re viewed as defensive and guilty.

Your organizational values are more important during a crisis than at any other time. If they’re sincere and deeply held, they can reaffirm your organization’s humanity and improve the negative perceptions the crisis has precipitated. If they’re just words on the wall (Enron leaps to mind again), they can only do you harm. Here are four steps to take at the outset of a crisis:

• Define the symbols
• Set your key messages
• Set specific objectives
• Determine the metrics you’ll use to assess your performance

Your strategies should be based on prioritizing the constituents whose interests you will address. Too many organizations adopt a shareholder value mentality (the same philosophy that governed Enron’s actions). Had Johnson & Johnson put shareholders at the top of the list, the company probably would have waited for a government recall to pull Tylenol off the shelves. Short-term sales might have been salvaged, but long-term customer confidence would have been crippled. By putting customers first, confidence was high and sales skyrocketed when the product was reintroduced with the first-ever safety cap (addressing the public’s risk-averse nature). Ultimately, shareholders benefited from being dropped near the bottom of the priority list:

• The affected party (or parties)
• Customers and consumers
• Employees
• Local communities
• Shareholders
• Government

Response guidelines

When responding to a crisis, you should…

• Respond quickly, accurately, professionally and with great care
• Treat perceptions as fact
• Acknowledge mistakes (today, we’d say, “Be transparent”)
• Tailor messages to address the aggrieved or angry party
• Note the other side’s concerns; don’t be dismissive
• Make no public confrontations
• Emphasize the existing relationships in which you have built capital; they are more credible during a crisis than your own spokespersons

Of course, there’s much, much more to crisis communication than this brief summary. But if you keep these points in mind, you won’t go far wrong when facing a crisis.

Still, the two most important things you can do: Develop and maintain a crisis plan and drill it at least once each quarter with all of the company representatives who will have a role in a real crisis, including (and most importantly) the senior leadership team.

UPDATE: Ike Pigott, from the American Red Cross, sent along an addition list that I like a lot—the metrics by which he measures a PR crisis:

• Power of impact (immediate damage) How hard is this strike?
• Breadth of impact (duration) How long will it be remembered?
• Depth of impact (cleanup) How isolated is the damage? Is it one person’s screwup or a system failure?  Fixed with one firing or a massive review?